Rian Johnson Wrote New Scenes for ‘The Last Jedi’ Novelization, Plus First Footage of Cut Scene

As with most movies, there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t end up making it into Star Wars: The Last Jedi — even though it was two and a half hours long. Plenty of ideas and scenes had to be cut to save time or to keep the flow of the movie even. The good news is that we can see many of these lost scenes, plus some new material, in The Last Jedi’s novelization that comes out in March.

While appearing on an episode of The Star Wars Show, Rian Johnson and author Jason Fry — a Star Wars veteran who’s written a number of reference books and young adult novels — talked about what we can expect from the book, and a few of the new scenes Johnson wrote for it. Johnson mentioned that he and Fry “got to talk through some interesting deleted scenes from the film,” and added, “that’s some of the fun stuff you can get into a novel that you can’t always get onto the screen.”

While Johnson and Fry detailed the new scenes, The Star Wars Show also shared the first footage of a deleted Last Jedi scene, expected to be on the upcoming Blu-ray release. The footage is from a cut scene in which Luke gives a third lesson to Rey involving the Ahch-To Caretakers and Chewie having a party. /Film has the full description of the scene, but you can see a glimpse of it at the 3:55 mark in the video below:

Fry also said, “Rian Johnson and I had an amazing conversation. We got to write entirely new scenes for the book: Han Solo’s funeral, Rose and Paige Tico together, and further explorations of the fascinating world of Canto Bight, to name just a few.”

I’m so glad they’re including more Rose and Paige material in here, because while Paige’s death, when you learn who she was, was surely an emotional touchstone in the movie, getting to see more of their characters interacting would have given their relationship and Rose’s character even more depth. And I would spend a whole series of books hanging out in Canto Bight.